A 3D virtual environment for creating new fireworks

There are many obstacles to prevent the timely development of competitive new products. Virtual Reality(VR) is a potential technology to improve this situation significantly. A synthetic 3D virtual environment(VE) can be organized to enable both developers and customers to collaborate on the designing, prototyping, testing, evaluation, and production of new products. The introduction of the VE reduces time and cost required for development, enabling manufacturers to evaluate new products from the customer's viewpoint and get quick feedback from customers. We are developing a prototype system, targeted at creating new fireworks in a VE. The purpose is to investigate the fundamental issues in constructing a 3D VE and explore methods to apply the VE technologies to product development, through this prototype implementation and evaluation. In this paper, first we describe our research goals with a system model to show that a fireworks creation process implies many fundamental themes argumented over the VE technologies. Then we discuss the prototype system overview, implementation details of parallel simulation and rendering, some observations acquired from initial experiments, and conclusions with future directions.